Powerful node based compositing

Whether you're a single shot compositor or working across projects end to end, you can find all the tools you need to get the job done fast, without quality compromise, in NUKE STUDIO, NUKEX or NUKE.

Power and performanceBuilt to meet the needs of modern production work, the NUKE range offers unparalleled levels of power and confidence whether you’re a team with a deadline or working solo with a client.

Collaborative workflowEfficient, collaborative workflows lie at the heart of the NUKE range. Whether you're working in a group of artists or running an effects department, NUKE makes team-work seamless.

Compositing and much moreAll the tools you need to get the job done, no matter how you're working. From editorial to finishing and tracking to model building, the NUKE range can scale to suit your needs.

Speed and efficiencyWork fast and interactively with NUKE’s cutting-edge toolkits, GPU acceleration and fluid workflows. Everything you need to get the job done fast is built in and ready to go.

Open and customizableWith major operating system compatibility, low hardware requirements and Python API, NUKE integrates seamlessly into your workflow.

Which NUKE is right for me?

An award-winning compositor, NUKE provides state-of-the-art tools designed to streamline day-to-day workflow and ensure highest quality results fast. Get the visual result you want while retaining the power and flexibility to solve any production challenge.

NUKEX combines the core functionality of NUKE with an ‘out of the box’ toolkit of exclusive functionality, removing the need to roundtrip to other applications. NUKEX has it all built right in including a camera tracker, model builder, particle system and much more.

NUKE STUDIO is a powerful node-based VFX, editorial and finishing studio designed to empower creative individuals working independently as well as collaborative teams working on quick-turnaround projects in a way that’s previously never been possible.

New Features in NUKE, NUKEX and NUKE STUDIO 10

Accelerated Roto Paint performance

Now you can enjoy greatly improved interactivity and stability when working with large numbers of paint strokes in a single RotoPaint node. With a number of bottlenecks identified and addressed, you'll be able to do more painting or cloning in a single node where previously you'd need to split it over multiple nodes, with all the inherent workflow complications that entailed.

Vector Blur enhancements

NUKE's VectorBlur node has been revamped with a more intuitive UI, accelerated performance and higher quality motion blur results, including areas of occlusion. The new version makes better use of the available processing power in machines with many CPU cores and offers the option for GPU acceleration.

Localization system improvements

We've unified the way NUKE and NUKE STUDIO perform localization, taking the best parts of each system to produce a faster, easier-to-use solution that features a more informative and responsive UI, together with greater stability.

OCIO Integration

OpenColorIO has been integrated into NUKE's root LUT management, so artists can use the same process for accessing OCIO LUTs as any other type, eliminating the need to add OCIOColorspace nodes.

NVIDIA multi-GPU support

Take better advantage of your graphics hardware investment to accelerate your workflows, with new support for harnessing the power of dual identical NVIDIA GPUs for all existing and future GPU-accelerated nodes.

BlinkScript GLSL GPU path

The BlinkScript node can now use a GLSL GPU path, allowing you to create custom GPU-enabled Soft Effects on the NUKE STUDIO timeline and in the node graph.

VFX Reference Platform 2015 updates

Updates to the VFX Reference Platform libraries include Pyside to version 1.2.2; EXR to version 2.2, featuring DWAA/DWAB compression; and GCC to version 4.8.3.

Ray trace renderer - BETA

A new RayRender node adds a native ray trace rendering engine to NUKE. As an addition to the existing ScanlineRender node workflow, the Ray Renderer delivers high-quality motion blur and shadows; point light shadow support; faster nonlinear spherical projection; and extended support for reflections and ambient occlusion.

New Features in NUKEX and NUKE STUDIO 10

Smart Vector toolset

The Smart Vector toolset delivers a powerful new workflow for adding textures or paint to image sequences that contain complex motion or subtle detail. With it, you can generate high-quality motion vectors and use them to automatically push or warp an input image sequence across a range of frames. With the Smart Vector toolset, you can replace tedious and error-prone manual clean-up, replacement and augmentation tasks with a simple and accurate automated process.

NUKE Assist updates

The NUKE Assist licenses included with NUKEX and NUKE STUDIO now include Blur and Vector Distort nodes, extending the range of everyday paint, roto and tracking tasks for which they can be used.

New Features in NUKE STUDIO 10

Timeline performance

NUKE STUDIO now offers a faster and more satisfying timeline editing and conform experience, especially when working with longer timelines or timelines with many items. Key improvements include better responsiveness when interacting with the timeline user interface along with faster and more stable playback on both short and long-form projects.

Chroma Keyer Soft Effect

NUKE STUDIO’s new Chroma Keyer Soft Effect delivers real-time keying directly in the timeline. When used in conjunction with the Overlay Track, Chroma Keyer lets you see your keyed element on top of background elements, enabling you to make adjustments in context. The corresponding ChromaKeyer compositing node is available in all NUKE products.

The BlinkScript node is now available as a Soft Effect on the NUKE STUDIO timeline, allowing you to create custom GPU-enabled Soft Effects on the timeline and in the node graph.

Color Correct Soft Effect

A new Color Correct Soft Effect brings the functionality of the frequently used ColorCorrect node to the timeline, letting you make quick adjustments to contrast, gamma, gain, and offset without jumping to the node graph.

Audio handling

You can now scrub or step through audio samples in order to easily match specific points in a clip or sequence. In addition, there’s a new option to view a half waveform for better use of screen real estate.

New Features in NUKE, NUKEX and NUKE STUDIO 9

Everything’s got a lot faster

Significant engineering effort has been dedicated to making performance boosts across the board. Not only have we greatly increased overall performance in NUKE 9 compared to NUKE 8, but we’ve also made huge leaps forward in performance of NUKE’s EXR reader, Deep EXR reader, and Scanline renderer to name a few.

Native Flipbooking

We've used new NUKE STUDIO technology to create a native Flipbook panel inside of NUKE and NUKEX, bringing integrated and real-time player capabilities to both applications and removing the need to roundtrip to other flipbooking software.

New image formats supported

NUKE 9 adds support for MXF files, including read from MXF for DNxHD, Sony RAW (F55 and F65), XAVC and others. We’ve also added GPU debayering for ARRI and RED raw files.

Denoise comes to NUKE

The release of NUKE 9 sees the power of the previously NUKEX-exclusive Denoise tool come to every product in the NUKE range.

OFlow gets GPU accelerated

NUKE’s OFlow tool has been further integrated and enhanced to give you new control over retime curves in the source time range, combining to give you concise, intuitive control over your speed ramps. And it’s been GPU accelerated.

Performance profiling for all

NUKE’s performance profiling has been updated to give more accurate and detailed information on scripts, and now runs across three platforms. Color coding has been added for better visibility on individual scripts, Python calls now provide Python access to timing information for individual nodes and you can now run NUKE from the command line and get the full performance profile for a render in XML format.

Mip-map filtering for the Scanline Render

NUKE 9's Scanline Render will improve your rendering speed, particularly when sampling from large textures, with the addition of new mip-map texture filters, including options for Nearest, Bilinear, Trilinear and Anisotropic.

Drop shadow added to the Text node

NUKE's Text node has been improved by the addition of a new shadows tab within the node, making it fast and simple to add drop shadows and outlines to your text.

Camera and Axis nodes get an update

NUKE 9 adds a Look pipe to the Camera and Axis nodes which mimics the behaviour of the Transform Geo nodes 'look' input functionality.

Curve Editing with less clicks

The improved Curve Editor in NUKE 9 speeds up your workflow by showing curves for both Comp nodes and timeline Soft Effects. There's now a single adjustment panel which has both x and y number fields which can be jumped between using the tab key.

Backdrop node update

NUKE’s Backdrop nodes have been improved to provide a z order option in the control panel. You can specify a particular z level at which the backdrop will appear in the node graph.

New Features exclusive to NUKEX and NUKE STUDIO 9

KRONOS 2

The new motion estimation algorithm in KRONOS 2 improves the quality of your retimes, giving you a smoother warp with less artifacts and improved image reconstruction with less "pulsing" between sharp and blurry results. KRONOS 2 also comes with new resampling methods (Lanczos), new control over retime curves, improved range integration as well as Blink GPU acceleration.

Vector Generator 2

Based on KRONOS 2, the new Vector Generator comes with improved quality vectors based on the new motion estimation algorithm. It also provides Blink GPU acceleration.

Motion Blur 2

Based on KRONOS 2, the new motion estimation algorithm in Motion Blur 2 provides you with faster and more accurate results. Motion Blur 2 also provides Blink GPU acceleration.

Planar Tracker 2

Planar Tracker 2 has an added new region tracking algorithm which works with featureless areas of footage. Planar Tracker and Roto now appear as a single, integrated node with a new pattern-matching algorithm with a luminance shift option for shots where luminance alters within the tracking region.

Particles with more possibilities

An improved Particle Bounce node creates a whole new range of possibilities for particles by adding a new 'geometry' input which allows you to connect any native NUKE geometry or read-in geometry, including OBJ, Alembic, FBX, for particles to bounce off.

Previously Released Features

In-viewer text compose, edit and animate

The new Text node in NUKE 8.0 allows artists to enter text directly into the viewer and edit or animate on a per-character basis.

A new virtual slider knob gives artists easy and detailed control over adjustments with a simple click and drag solution in the number field.

Powerful timeline viewing

NUKE 8.0’s Dope Sheet has been greatly enhanced and allows artists to see and move keys around in time with the results and each property of the node accurately displayed in context inside of the dope sheet.

Artist friendly colour controls

The intuitive in-panel colour wheel in NUKE 8.0 updates the existing colour knobs with a new drop down panel making it easier and faster to select and change a colour.

Scopes are a new addition to NUKE 8.0 designed to give artists access to detailed levels of colour data on images displayed in the viewer.

Enhanced viewer rendering results NUKE 8.0’s new Full Frame viewer mode ensures the full frame of the viewer is always processed when rendering, regardless of zoom level, and allows artists to playback and zoom in/out without the viewer recalculating any newly exposed scanlines.

Intelligent in-application help

NUKE 8.0 comes pre-packed with a new intelligent in-context help system to complement the existing node-specific in-application tooltips. This easy to use interactive online HTML help loads your default browser directly from within NUKE and includes all information currently found in NUKE’s PDF Getting Started Guide, User Guide and Reference Guide, as well as video tutorials and example .nk scripts that open in your existing session.

Advanced 3D controls

The New Viewer Capture functionality in NUKE 8.0 lets artists create a flipbook of the images from the viewer to quickly and easily check shots, for example the animation of a 3D scene, in real-time without having to do a full scanline render.

A new Edit Geo node in NUKE 8.0 allows artists to modify the vertices or faces of native NUKE geometry, or any geometry read in through a Read Geo node, including: Alembic, OBJ, FBX to give greater control over 3D elements.

The Particle Cache node in NUKE 8.0 speeds up rendering times by letting artist save a particle system’s simulation to file and then read it back in different sessions or on different machines at will, without the need to recalculate.

NUKE 8.0’s new Wireframe Shader node lets artists apply wireframes to a variety of different geometry types, giving them access to a range of additional effects and enhanced control over projection alignment.

NUKE 8.0 also includes new Wireframe Render option on the render mode knob of all 3D geometry nodes that gives added choice to artists when rendering objects or full scenes.

OpenEXR 2.0 adds multi-part image read and write support to NUKE 8.0. With these capabilities artists can store their views and layers in separate subfiles to significantly increase speed when only working on a few layers at a time.

NUKE 8.0 also supports the recently released Alembic 1.5 which brings with it improvements in write, read, and especially multi-threaded read performance.

NUKEX Exclusive Features

The new Match Grade node in NUKE 8.0 automatically modifies the colour histogram of an image to match a reference and makes grading simple and fast.

Environments made easy

NUKE’s Camera Tracker has been completely remodelled to include the projection solver and a new Camera Calibrator. These updates let artists track and solve cameras from reference stills and can be used to assist with set or object modelling.

NUKE’s Model Builder has been updated to give artists the power to create UV’s within NUKE useful when adding new 3D elements to existing clips.

Plugged further into the Pipeline

New Apply Material Filter options help to streamline 3D texture application on objects inside of NUKE. Artists can now choose to add textures to subsets of a model without needing to separate geometry into unique nodes.

Unrivalled speed and power

NUKE 7.0 features the highly sought-after addition of RAM cache, which has been introduced to give artists real-time playback. In addition this major release introduces a variety of GPU accelerated nodes for NUKEX including MotionBlur, Kronos,Denoise, VectorGenerator, Convolve and ZDefocus.

This is a fundamental change that will allow artists to utilise the power of their GPUs to speed up interactive image processing times. When the GPU is available NUKEX will now take full advantage of that power. If it's unavailable, the software simply reverts back to the CPU without any need to adjust settings.

Day to day compositing the way you want it

The roto tools in NUKE have been entirely redefined to enhance performance and improve stereo support, giving artists more control than ever before.

NUKE 7.0 includes Primatte 5 and a brand new 2D tracker with big updates to the workflow and speed. Support for new camera raw formats has been added including ARRIRAW and the latest R3D SDK.

The SplineWarp node and DopeSheet have also benefited from major improvements.

Blurring the line between 2D and 3D

NUKE 7.0 also brings with it a number of options that allow artists to do more within NUKE. Artists are now able to relight renders in the comp environment using the ReLight node and even model usingNUKEX's new ModelBuilder.

Both of these additions reduce the need to roundtrip to another tool or hand work off to other departments.

The Deep compositing workflow also sees the addition of the industry standard OpenEXR 2.0 Deep file format, and NUKE's 3D system welcomes the addition of the Alembic file format.

Primatte 5 - The latest upgrade to Primatte 5 brings with it numerous improvements and new features, including: Improved auto compute, new smart background color select, new hybrid render and adjust lighting features and multiple new output modes.

Upgraded PositionToPoints tool - Create point clouds quickly and easily with newly improved PositionToPoints tool that lets artists alter point clouds with geometry modifiers and choose the channels from one input rather than having to pipe in two.

Upgraded Relight tool - Now a fully supported node giving artists the ability relight renders in the comp environment, removing the need to roundtrip to other packages for quick fixes and adjustments

Improved DopeSheet and new TimeClip node - Gives artists powerful new ways to visually move elements around the timeline.

New Bookmark feature - Gives artists the ability to bookmark nodes or backdrops in the node graph, and jump between them using the assigned hotkeys or the bookmarks search box.

Deep data & Alembic support - Push the boundaries of Deep compositing with new OpenEXR 2.0 Deep data read and write capability, as well as read and write geometry and cameras to and from Sony Picture Imageworks' Alembic file format.

FBX 2012 Support - NUKE now supports FBX 2012 7.2, as well as being back-compatible with all previous versions.

New Format Support - new camera format support for ARRIRAW and latest update for R3D SDK.

New Features exclusively for NUKEX

NUKEX features the core NUKE toolset complimented with exclusive cutting edge tools to ease day to day compositing tasks without having to leave the package.

Multiple GPU Accelerated Nodes - This fundamental upgrade allows artists to utilise the power of their GPU's to speed up interactive processing when dealing with: MotionBlur, Kronos, Denoise, VectorGenerator, Convolve and ZDefocus. If the GPU is unavailable NUKE will simply revert back to the CPU without needing to adjust setting

New ZDefocus tool - A significant upgrade to the ZBlur tool which now includes GPU acceleration, as well as an improved algorithm and much more.

Particle improvements - Giving greater speed than ever before, NUKE’s particles can now inherit velocity from emitter geometry and emit from the bounding box volume of an object.

ModelBuilder - Create 3D models of sets and props quickly and easily, without having to roundtrip to another tool with NUKE's new ModelBuilder.

NUKEX 6.3’s true 3D particle system integrates seamlessly with NUKE’s 3D workspace. Artists can create a range of particle effects quickly and effectively within the composite including breaking windows, dust, fire and rain. No need to go back and forth to an external 3D rendering package.

Planar Tracker (X)

NUKEX 6.3 brings Planar Tracking to NUKE dramatically speeding up common compositing tasks such as sign replacement, element inserts and clean plate generation. Any new element to be matched to a planar surface such as the face of a building, floor, car side, etc. can easily be tracked, placed and animated.

Denoise (X)

The Foundry’s research team won a Sci-Tech® Award for their original FURNACE algorithms in 2007. They have now written a completely new Wavelet-based Denoise algorithm resulting in cleaner and more visually pleasing results with less artefacts which is already being well received.

Spline and Grid Warping

We have completely rewritten the Spline and Grid Warping tools in NUKE to make them more intuitive and accurate to use. The point and spline UI is shared with RotoPaint allowing the exchange of curves, attachment of spline and grid points to trackers, editing of animation in the curve editor / dope sheet and Python scripting support.

Performance

The Local Read Cache can automatically create local copies of image sequences located on a network to reduce network traffic, improve user experience and artist interactivity. The aggressive caching option takes advantage of available RAM to speed up compositing, avoiding re-rendering when changing frames or moving from script editing to playback.

Audio Scratch Track

The Audio Scratch Track works with NUKE’s curve editor, allowing artists to match their VFX to audio cues and generate animation curves from audio waveforms.

Displacement Shader

This surface shader applies dynamic tessellation and displacement of 3D geometry at render time, resulting in quicker and higher quality 2d-3d stereoscopic conversion. This also has a similar effect on other 3D VFX compositing tasks such as virtual environment creation.

3D Projection

Project3D can now detect occlusions to stop projections passing through faces and objects. It is now quick and easy to set up high quality projections without unwanted artifacts.

Customisation

NUKE’s already open architecture has been extended to make it even more customisable. A comprehensive new Developers Manual for both C++ and Python programmers makes it easier for more technical artists to write plug-ins and automate common pipeline tasks. The addition of LGPL Qt 4.6 also allows the use of any Qt user interface component directly inside NUKE.

Deep Compositing

Deep Compositing allows artists to work with ‘deep images’ containing multiple opacity or colour samples per pixel. This allows rendering of CGI elements without predetermined holdout mattes, avoiding the need for re-renders when content changes.

Nuke offers an extremely open architecture. Both its node graph and user interface are accessible through the Python and TCL scripting languages, making it possible to customize Nuke in innumerable ways. If you really want to drill down, Nuke supports the industry standard OFX plug-in API as well as a native developers’ kit (NDK) for creating your own tightly integrated plug-ins.

Filtering: find and select nodes and groups according to name or comment.

Version / Release Updates

NUKE 10.5 is here!!

The NUKE 10.5 release contains new features and workflow enhancements that make NUKE STUDIO more reliable, more flexible and easier to use. Here are some of the enhancements existing customers have asked us for:

New ability to control the format and resolution to be used for plates and renders in any part of the project, while maintaining any Soft Effects

Creating a composition script from the timeline now maintains concatenation for higher quality results, reduces node complexity and produces a better layout

Improved export controls that let you specify different resolutions for exported comps versus rendered frames, among other enhancements

We’ve added 11 additional blend modes to choose from when overlaying tracks in the timeline, including Multiply, Color Burn and Screen

x86-64 processor, such as Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon, with SSE3 instruction set support (or newer)

5 GB disk space available for caching and temporary files

At least 1 GB RAM

Display with at least 1280 x 1024 pixel resolution and 24-bit color

Graphics card with at least 512 MB of video memory and driver support for OpenGL 2.0

three-button mouse

To enable optional GPU acceleration of Viewer processing, you need OpenGL 2.0 with support for floating point textures and GLSL.To enable NUKEX 7.0 to calculate certain nodes using the GPU, you need to have:

Graphics drivers capable of running CUDA 4.0 or above. On Windows and Linux, these are the normal graphics drivers for your NVIDIA GPU: Windows 275.36 (released June 20111.19) or later, Linux 270.41.19 (released May 2011) or later.

Mac OS X

x86-64 processor, such as Intel Core 2 Duo or later

5 GB of disk space available for caching and temporary files

At least 1 GB of RAM

Display with at least 1280 x 1024 pixel resolution and 24-bit color

Graphics card with at least 512 MB of video memory and driver support for OpenGL 2.0

To enable optional GPU acceleration of Viewer processing, you need OpenGL 2.0 with support for floating point textures and GLSL.

To enable NUKEX 7.0 to calculate certain nodes using the GPU, you need to have:

Graphics drivers capable of running CUDA 4.0 or above. On Mac, the CUDA driver is separate from the NVIDIA graphics driver and will need to be installed, if you don't have it already. Graphics drivers can be downloaded fromhttp://www.nvidia.com/drivers and the minimum requirement for CUDA 4.0 is 256.02 (released June 2011).

Licensing

Nuke licenses are issued as floating. Node-locked licenses are available upon request.

All licenses are locked to the computers MAC/Ethernet address. Download Foundry System ID from the link below. Once downloaded, launching the program will generate a pop-up with your system ID. Send your System ID to RFX for licensing.

Steve Wright is a senior visual effects artist and trainer with over 20 years of production experience creating digital effects for over 60 feature films, including three years working with the Digital Intermediate process. As a senior digital compositing artist and 2D Technical Director he has an unusual combination of both artistic and technical understanding of Digital Compositing and Digital Intermediate.